Solving Epistemic Logic Programs using Generate-and-Test with Propagation

TL;DR

This paper presents a flexible generate-and-test framework for epistemic logic programs, introducing a new generator with propagation that significantly improves solver efficiency and performance.

Contribution

It proposes a general framework with correctness conditions and a novel generator incorporating propagation, leading to more efficient epistemic logic program solving.

Findings

Achieves approximately 3.3x speed-up over existing solvers.

Solves 91% more benchmark instances.

Demonstrates exponential reduction in candidate testing with linear overhead.

Abstract

This paper introduces a general framework for generate-and-test-based solvers for epistemic logic programs that can be instantiated with different generator and tester programs, and we prove sufficient conditions on those programs for the correctness of the solvers built using this framework. It also introduces a new generator program that incorporates the propagation of epistemic consequences and shows that this can exponentially reduce the number of candidates that need to be tested while only incurring a linear overhead. We implement a new solver based on these theoretical findings and experimentally show that it outperforms existing solvers by achieving a ~3.3x speed-up and solving 91% more instances on well-known benchmarks.